Revolutionizing Workflow Agility: Gilmore Doculink Transforms Production with Solimar’s Rubika

“The challenge,” explains Chris Beech, Manager of Composition Services at Gilmore Doculink, “was finding a way to let dynamic content flex within a defined design without adding days of composition work for every little change.” This pain point represents exactly what many leading print service providers face today as they balance high-volume production against increasingly personalized client communication needs.

Gilmore Doculink, a long-time Solimar user committed to operational excellence, specializes in handling sensitive customer data for bills, statements, and collection notices. As customer expectations for personalized communication continue to grow, the data and production teams recognized an opportunity to enhance their workflow. While managing variable data at scale with efficiency and compliance, they discovered that handling frequent change requests during composition was becoming less efficient for certain job segments.

Rather than reverting to traditional document composition platforms, the team brilliantly leveraged existing tools in their ecosystem. By implementing post-composition document engineering with Rubika, they successfully streamlined their workflow while eliminating previously required processes.

Solimar recently connected with Customer Advisory Council Members, Chris Beech and Julia Saltarelli-McCrea, Gilmore Doculink Business Solutions Manager, to explore how the Solimar Rubika solution continues to address real-world customer challenges quickly and elegantly.

Bills and statements demand precision. Address fields, account numbers, legal text, and variable marketing messages must appear exactly as intended, without introducing layout errors or compliance risks. Historically, incorporating dynamic elements like variable-length text blocks meant returning to composition software, requiring programmer intervention, server reprocessing, and additional quality control layers.

The complexity intensified for Gilmore Doculink due to requirements for bilingual French and English notices. When collection letters or customer notices needed variable text strings that could expand or contract based on the data source, traditional tools either required extensive upfront programming or offered minimal flexibility for midstream adjustments.

Traditionally, modifying variable data and formatting required revisiting complex composition software environments. These powerful environments often demand specialized programmers, longer production cycles, and additional validation steps to ensure compliance and print readiness.

By shifting variable data injection and text reflow tasks to the Solimar Rubika post-composition tool, Gilmore Doculink achieved:

• Flexibility: Changes to data fields or content layout can be made without altering original composition files, reducing dependency on skilled programmers and composition servers.
• Shorter Turnaround Times: Post-composition edits enable immediate updates directly on print-ready PDFs, significantly reducing the time to market and minimizing missed deadline risks.
• Streamlined Workflow: Integrating post-composition editing simplifies the entire production process. Data files flow through a unified pipeline—ingestion, validation, variable data merging, and final output—without branching into multiple complex systems.
• Lower Operational Costs: Fewer software licenses, reduced programming overhead, and minimized reprocessing time all contribute to a leaner, more efficient operation.
• Reduced Risk: Minimizing the number of touchpoints and handoffs required to insert or modify data makes the workflow less error-prone and easier to audit, all of which supports the ideal of using unadulterated data supplied by the customer.

In today’s rapidly evolving print environment, where agility and efficiency drive competitiveness, Gilmore Doculink’s innovative approach demonstrates how reimagining traditional workflows can create significant strategic advantages.

Gilmore Doculink turned to Rubika, their trusted solution for powerful post-composition designed to enhance PDF documents with exceptional flexibility and speed. Instead of rebuilding documents from scratch, Rubika empowered the company to overlay variable data onto pre-approved, boilerplate PDF templates dynamically.

The use case Chris refined with the Solimar support team is elegantly simple yet remarkably powerful: using Rubika to inject variable data into predefined text boxes, automatically allowing the text to reflow across lines or paragraphs based on length. If a paragraph were longer, it would gracefully flow to a second line without disrupting the layout. If shorter, the formatting remained clean and professional. Rubika also inserts the messages and the alternate date field in French.

“It removes the need for a full-blown composition environment for what are really straightforward jobs,” Chris said. “It’s just another wrench in the toolbox that makes us more agile.”

In practical terms, Gilmore Doculink used Rubika to:

• Import a CSV file containing the necessary variable data.
• Seamlessly merge data fields such as addresses, account numbers, and custom paragraphs into designated areas of an existing PDF.
• Automatically reflow text to avoid cutoff, overflow, or manual resizing.
• Maintain boilerplate branding and legal content without reprocessing.
• Output clean, compliant PDFs ready for print or electronic presentment.

Leveraging their existing Rubika installation, Gilmore Doculink gained significant operational advantages. It enabled unprecedented speed and responsiveness, as data could now be injected and finalized within hours rather than days, which is critical for time-sensitive communications like collection letters and customer notifications. They also achieved substantial cost savings by eliminating separate composition software licenses and significantly reducing the time spent by programmers managing simple data changes.

Additionally, Gilmore Doculink accomplished workflow standardization by consolidating processes within the Solimar ecosystem. As Julia explained, “Having everything touch Solimar solutions means we’re removing extra steps and software dependencies. It keeps our workflow simpler, faster, and easier to manage.” Data integrity and compliance improved as Rubika’s closed-loop processing ensured consistent handling of sensitive customer data across all production stages with comprehensive audit capabilities. Finally, the solution’s scalability enabled the company to smoothly onboard new jobs and accommodate growing client needs without creating additional production bottlenecks.

Chris and Julia both envision Rubika as a foundational element of Gilmore Doculink’s evolving technology stack. Exciting upcoming projects include customer welcome kits for financial institutions and enhanced multilingual document support, where dynamic localization and flexible content insertion will become even more vital.

“The more we can automate intelligently,” Chris noted, “the more time we free up for adding value elsewhere — better designs, better customer service, and better data handling.”

Gilmore Doculink’s inspiring journey reminds us that innovation in print doesn’t always require massive overhauls or expensive new platforms. Sometimes, the right tool, applied with expertise and creativity, can transform production operations and significantly enhance a company’s competitive edge and bottom line.